Sales Intelligence Blog by Lattice Engines

Many sales leaders separate their “hunters” – the salespeople who have to go out and find new customers from – from their “farmers” whose job it is to get more business from existing customers. The rationale behind this approach is that the two selling motions require two very different personalities and skillsets. Hunters have to be resourceful in identifying and finding lines to new customers and have a personality that is comfortable cold calling. Farmers need to build strong relationships and be creative in the ways they extract more value from those relationships – from selling additional products or services to leveraging the relationships to get sales elsewhere in the organization.

However this separation does not always work. McKinsey & Company interviewed 100 sales executives across industries over the last year to learn about what really works. One of the things they found is that while separating hunters from farmers initially worked well, it sometimes lead to discouragement from the hunters who were experiencing success much less frequently than their farming colleagues. One company studied found the true path to sales growth was to combine both functions: have all salespeople farming while dedicating a certain chunk of time per day, week, or month, to hunting.

To read about this and the three other innovative approaches McKinsey indentified for sales growth including anticipating technological advances, improved incentives, and better segment-price alignment, go to the McKinsey Quarterly article here.

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We were delighted to be asked to present at VMware’s Annual Partner Exchange earlier this month.  The conference brings together over 3,300 of VMware’s partners from sixty-three countries, with a primary goal of educating and enabling partners for success with VMware.

The conference agenda was packed with role-based sessions oriented towards both sales and technical professionals across a wide spectrum of topics, products and focus areas.  Specifically, we were asked to present on ‘Enabling a Prospecting Culture’.  Our presentation, delivered with VMware’s head of North American Sales, Mike Clayville, discussed the strategies, tools and tactics used at VMware to drive their highly successful prospecting culture.  

Mike began the presentation by stressing the importance of “Fishing Where The Fish Are”, the key to a successful prospecting culture.  “Fishing Where The Fish Are” essentially means sales rep must quickly find accounts which are ready to buy & focus efforts on those accounts. 

Mike then turned over the microphone to us, to articulate how salesPRISM sales intelligence software finds the “fish” & is a key enabler to VMware’s strong prospecting culture.  Our section of the presentation focused on three topics:

• How salesPRISM integrates internal and external data sources, then predicts the accounts that are most likely to buy. 
• The importance of how salesPRISM dynamically generates talking points, to help sales reps engage customers in contextual conversations. 
• Most importantly, we demonstrated use cases for VMware’s partner sales representatives, and the significant results that were achieved.

The impact of the presentation is best illustrated by a question that a partner sales leader asked us before Q&A even began, “What do I need to do to get this?”  Clearly, the audience saw the value in driving a strong prospecting culture, and how salesPRISM enables companies to “Fish Where The Fish Are”.

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